About four years ago when Amy Joy Dyck was pregnant with her second child, she started researching art about being pregnant. As an artist, she thought she’d find numerous paintings, sculpture and other works that she could study.

To her surprise, she didn’t find anything that spoke to her own experience of motherhood.

“All I could find was baby pink and baby blue and all these sentimental, lacy pictures — which is all fine and great,” Dyck said.

“That’s not how I feel. For me, it felt like there was more to discover and explore.”

What she didn’t find among all the motherhood art was anything that reflected her quirky view of the world.

Ideas began to flow after her daughter Lilah was born, joining brother Gabriel — who is a year older — in the Dyck family. Dyck started to think about exercising and getting in shape.

It occurred to her that rotund people often use their bellies as a table for their plates while they’re eating. In a flight of fancy, she imagined a woman who was so big she could use her pregnant belly as a substitute for an exercise ball.

Her brainstorming led to the making of I Brought My Own Ball, a coloured drawing on wood. It shows three athletic woman stretching out and balancing — one on her massively oversized ball-like belly. Don’t try doing that at home, Dyck advised: Pregnant women shouldn’t balance on their bellies like her superwomen.

“I thought of it as something funny,” said Dyck, 32. “It’s meant to be playful, comical.”

I Brought My Own Ball (estimate $175) is one of the works being auctioned Saturday, July 20 at the Art of Motherhood Exhibition and Auction at Langley Centennial Museum. The event is a fundraiser for the Vandekerkhove Family Maternity Centre, a maternity expansion being built at Langley Memorial Hospital.

The Langley Memorial Hospital Foundation’s capital campaign, dubbed It All Starts Here, has raised $3.28 million of its $5.35-million target for the maternity project.

Dyck, who has contributed several original works for the auction, is one of 58 artists to participate in the exhibition and auction.

“I explore pregnancy and attempt to discuss the experiences, questions, fears that shape us as we walk (or waddle) along in the transformative journey from woman to mother,” she said in the catalogue.

Dyck’s series now includes several images that depict her unique take on pregnancy.

I Wonder, Will it Fit shows a woman trying on different torsos with varying sized bellies as if they were clothes on a sale rack in a store.

Don’t Mess With the Pregnant Lady shows a tough-looking woman dressed in black leather. Like a gunslinger from a western, she’s blowing off the smoke from the barrel of her gun. She means business.

“A lot of women are known to be a little moody when they’re pregnant,” she said. “You’re waddling around, you have this big thing in your stomach, you feel exhausted, you’re always hungry.

“I was running with the idea that sometimes when someone is pregnant, you don’t mess with them.”

Dyck’s pregnant women are also on art cards called Babe in The Bump, which are available at the Langley museum. Most of the proceeds from the sale of her cards there will go toward the maternity centre campaign.

Peter Tulumello, cultural services manager for the Langley Centennial Museum, said the idea for an exhibition on motherhood originated during research on the history of medicine in Langley. A big part of that story was the opening of Langley Memorial Hospital in 1948. What researchers discovered was that during the past 65 years, the number of births in the hospital have increased by about 85 a year to 1,800 in 2010. They’re projected to increase to 2,300 by 2020.

Yet since the hospital opened, the number of maternity beds has increased by only two: from 11 to 13. The money raised in the art auction and fundraising campaign is meant to add seven new beds to the maternity centre.

“We thought, what can we do as a museum to help bring awareness to that campaign and raise a few dollars?” Tulumello said.“Staff was brainstorming and came up with the idea: why don’t we do a motherhood art exhibition and ask whether artists would like to submit works around the theme of maternity, motherhood?”

All the works, which include paintings and sculptures, were initially shown in an exhibition on the Art of Motherhood in May and June at the museum.

For the auction, artists have donated between 100 per cent and 40 per cent of the price to the fundraising campaign. The museum is taking advance bids for anyone who can’t attend Saturday’s auction.

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